Metamaterials are receiving increasing attention in the scientific community in recent years due to their exciting physical properties and novel potential applications. Metamaterials can be engineered to exhibit negative permittivity and negative permeability over a given frequency range, and thereby provide negative refraction (NR). This can provide a number of benefits in the RF and optical fields.
Most of the previous metamaterial designs have utilized metallic elements, which are very lossy, have very narrow bandwidth, are anisotropic, are not conformal, and are almost impossible to realize for RF and optical devices. The prior techniques also require periodicity as the key to the performance, and this can increase the difficulty of fabrication. Furthermore, one generally needs to establish a large size structure in order to achieve the performance of interest.